Against All Odds at Agincourt, Recounted by Juliet Barker

On St. Crispin's Day in 1415, two unequal armies lined up against each other on a plain near the castle of Azincourt in northwestern France. On one side stood some 36,000 Frenchmen, eager to defend their home ground and elated at the prospect of certain victory. Across the field, an army of 6,000 Englishmen, exhausted after a two-week march and racked with dysentery, dug in for a desperate stand.

The outcome seemed foreordained, yet a few hours later the flower of French nobility lay dead on the field, surrounded, in the words of an English eyewitness, by "the masses, the mounds and the heaps of the slain." Against all odds, Henry V, England's young king, had won one of the most resounding victories in the annals of warfare. Just how this came to pass is the subject of "Agincourt," Juliet Barker's thoroughly engrossing study of Henry and the battle that made him.

England's situation was not quite as desperate as mere numbers made it seem. In a sense Henry's entire life had been careful preparation for this one glorious day, beginning with his hard-won military experience (he took an arrow in the face at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403) and lasting through the difficult early years of his rule, as he brought a restive kingdom under his control and earned (or bought) the loyalty of nobles who were, in effect, semi-independent warlords.

Henry landed on the shores of France supported by an artfully gathered coalition of the willing. They were well financed, well supplied and enthusiastically in favor of his legally dubious campaign to reclaim from France his "just right and inheritances," a vast territory stretching from its southern border with Spain to Calais in the north. He began with a campaign of shock and awe, an all-out assault on Harfleur, a port city in Normandy, that demonstrated the disciplined skill of the English to the courageous but overpowered French defenders.

In short order Henry wheeled his forces northward, toward the English stronghold of Calais, in full expectation that he would encounter the massed forces of the French along the way.

Ms. Barker is best known for her biographies of Wordsworth and the Brontë sisters, but she has also written authoritative studies of medieval tournaments and the culture of chivalry. This expertise greatly enriches the narrative, especially her detailed descriptions of the siege of Harfleur and the battle of Agincourt.

At every turn she offers fascinating miniature treatises on matters as various as the peculiarities of medieval maps, the use of the poleax, the role of minstrels, the manufacture of arrows and the rules governing the ransom of prisoners taken on the battlefield, which were not too different from the rules for sharing tips among modern-day restaurant workers: soldiers could keep a ransom of less than $4,000 or so, but one third of anything over that amount had to be paid to the soldier's captain, who, if he had been personally retained by the crown, passed on a third of his third to the king.

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Juliet Barker, author of "Agincourt."Credit
Chris Henderson

One feature of English military training, the esteem accorded to archery, gave the English a decisive advantage at Agincourt. On the Continent archery was looked down on as a lower-class pursuit, but all English noblemen, up to the king himself, were expected to wield the longbow and the crossbow with skill. A good archer, carrying between 60 and 72 arrows, could let loose as many as 20 aimed arrows a minute, which meant that barrages were short but intense. At Agincourt, English archers blackened the sky, raining death on the French with two types of arrows. Wing-tipped arrows pierced exposed flesh, both equine and human, while arrows tipped with needlelike bodkins slipped through openings in armor or even, at close range, penetrated steel plate.

At Agincourt the French greatly outnumbered the English when it came to knights in armor, but those same numbers proved to be their undoing. The code of chivalry demanded that nobles fight where they were most likely to win fame. Official heralds from both sides stood at strategic vantage points to observe the battle and set down for posterity the deeds of men at arms. The French battle plan had to be abandoned as the leading French noblemen, many named after the knights of Arthurian legend, all took their place in the vanguard.

Too many leaders and too many men to maneuver on a confined battlefield spelled trouble, as did the very same weather that would create misery in World War I. Torrential rains turned the battlefield into a quagmire that doomed horses and men weighed down by suits of armor. English losses were minimal. The tally on the French side was catastrophic.

"Agincourt cut a great swath through the natural leaders of French society in Artois, Ponthieu, Normandy, Picardy," Ms. Barker writes. "And there was no one to replace them."

Ms. Barker's Henry is Shakespeare's king, with more flesh added. He emerges as a cunning diplomat, a shrewd if ruthless leader and an administrative genius. A master of symbolism, he ingeniously played on English patriotism and religious faith to create the public image of a valiant and pious king hungry to restore English glory and humble before God.

There were, however, no tennis balls sent as a taunt by the French dauphin. And Henry might not have sent his troops into battle with a ringing appeal to St. George, but with a far more prosaic cry: "Felas, lets go!"